How To Create an Affiliate Site and Make $1000 /Month

February 13, 20190Comments

Starting and scaling an affiliate site is one of the most profitable business models online in 2018. One of my affiliate sites is getting almost 200,000 visitors/month (90% organic) and makes me close to 5-7k/month (80% affiliate commission).

One of the affiliate sites owned by Steve Cook, is getting almost 200,000 visitors/month

Many affiliate sites are sold for millions. The general trend is 20-30 times your website income. So the website that is making me 5K/month can easily be sold for almost $100,000.

So without wasting any more time, I will go through the process of creating and scaling an affiliate site from scratch. I have done it many times, and currently I manage 5 different affiliate websites. Almost all of them focus on affiliate commission, primarily CPA, CPL, CPI, CPS commission.

This is where Traffic Company comes into play. They have many amazing offers in various different niches. So for your niche, find a suitable offer on your Offer Wall and include the links in your content.

If you are not sure which offer to choose, then you can use a Smart Link, which will automatically show the best converting offer for your traffic.

TIP: When you are promoting direct offers from the Offer Wall, be sure to use the Conversion Optimizer. When enabled, it will try to convert mistargeted traffic through your Smart Link. This way you can still get some money from traffic that would otherwise be lost!

Step 1. Research on a profitable niche

This is an extremely important step. If you do this wrong, all the hard work you put into your site will go to waste. Find a niche that:

has low competition in search engine rankings

has affiliate products to sell

has enough search volume to create a profitable business. You should be able to make 5K-10K/month from affiliate commission alone.

To do niche research, you will be using just a single piece of software: Ahrefs. This software helps you draft your entire SEO strategy. The primary traffic source that you need to target for your affiliate site will be organic traffic. The process of getting your articles ranked in Google search results for your target keyword is known as Search Engine Optimization.

You have to look for the best type of search queries. Let’s say you have your interest in jewelry or technology, then you can find queries with best type operator and product based articles. For example for ‘Best wireless mouse’, these are the search results:

Search results for ‘Best wireless mouse’

A screenshot of the first result for ‘Best wireless mouse’

Ahrefs shows you the keyword difficulty and the expected organic traffic if you rank the number 1 position.

Keyword difficulty and expected organic traffic by Ahrefs

I generally target Ahrefs difficulty in the range of 0-30. Anything above this will require significant SEO efforts to get to the number 1 position.

If you are a beginner, just target a niche that has a low keyword difficulty score.

Once you find that this niche is the one you will be creating your site for, the next step is to build your site. And again, you can choose to include a Smart Link from your Traffic Company dashboard that will show the most relevant offer to your audience.

Step 2. Building an affiliate site: tech setup

Domain name: have the main keyword in the domain name.

Website hosting: you need a fast and reliable hosting for your affiliate site. Don’t be cheap in this area, invest in a high quality and fast hosting service so your website loads at lighting speed.

Theme: you can use any free theme, but I recommend the Genesis and Thrive themes.

And this is it. Your tech setup is done.

If you are a total newbie, then you can find various YouTube videos that explain this process step by step.

Step 3. Writing your first affiliate article

The only way you will be able to outrank your competition with a brand new site is by writing the most amazing piece of value-filled content about the topic you are targeting. Try to be comprehensive and cover every detail using about 4000-5000 words. Also include visuals, YouTube videos, bullet points, pros-cons, buyers guide, etc.

If you are using Amazon products, then you can become part of the Amazon Associate affiliate program.

Commission rates from the Amazon Associate affiliate program

The best part about being an Amazon Associate is that you get paid for every product that is sold in the next 24 hours by someone visiting through your affiliate links.

For other products you can search for prominent companies, find their affiliate program and then join it to get your affiliate links.

You can also use CPA, CPL, CPI, and CPS to make money. Check out the various (exclusive) offers from Traffic Company and decide for which offers you can write an article and get it ranked.

One of my CPA offers is converting like crazy. I am getting 3-4 signups every day (all from the article that is ranked at #1 on Google) and for each action I am getting paid $25. So, easy $100/day from just one article.

So, if you haven’t already done so, sign up with Traffic Company today and monetize your affiliate traffic. Once your article is ranking high in Google’s search results, you can add your CPA links and enjoy the commissions every month, by-weekly or weekly.

Step 4. SEO of your site

Now that the easy part is done, it’s time to talk about SEO and how to rank your article on the Google search results based on your target keywords. Learn everything about on-page SEO and implement the strategies in your articles as well. The keyword list can be downloaded from Ahrefs.com.

For off-page SEO, you need to build links into your new article. The best strategies that have worked for me is using infographics and guest posts. So, contact blogs in your niche about writing a high-quality guest post and include a link back to your article in the post.

For the infographic technique, you can hire a graphic designer from any freelance site and then get a quality infographic made for your topic. Infographics are a great way to build links. Once it’s made, again contact and ask relevant blogs to add your infographic on their site to earn links for your article.

This is what you need to do to get your article ranked based on your target keywords. The more organic traffic you get, the more affiliate sales you will make and therefore the more commission you will receive.

You can make a list of all such affiliate articles in your niche and then write the most valuable guide on it. Creating links for high quality value-filled articles is much easier compared to generic articles.

This was a concise version of a step by step process of creating a successful affiliate site from scratch. I agree that I could have been more comprehensive and detailed, but then this article probably would have turned into a book or even a video course.

So, learn the basics and then find out the answers for each step by doing more research on it. If you still have any question, then you can email me at [email protected]. I read all my emails and will be quick to reply ☺

Posted by Steve Cook

The publishing rights of this post belongs to the Company Traffic Company. For offering interesting information and creating better coverage, for our customers this information has been reposted.